november 3

Tuesdays were lazy mornings, at least compared to other weekday mornings. Eleanor’s first class wasn’t until 12:30, so she slept in a bit. Her phone alarm woke her at 9, and every five minutes for the next half hour. Nothing new there. But what was different about this morning was all the motion coming from the kitchen. The faint sound of music told her at least Ces was up there making breakfast. For some unknown reason Eleanor didn’t want to go up when someone else was there. But at 9:36 she was hungry, and the need to eat overwhelmed her need to be by herself while doing it.

Coming up the stairs the smell of omelets hit her. Ces has been cooking. Liz was there as well, just putting bread into the toaster for her own breakfast and turning on the coffee maker – a pink affair decked out in Hello Kitty as well, another addition from Ces. Disappointed that she would have to wait for her bagel, Eleanor decided to get something else to eat. She got down her Pampered Chef microwave pot and began gathering ingredients for Coco Wheats. She added some of the chocolate almond milk in addition to regular milk for that extra chocolate kick.

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After a quick shower she set to work writing her paper for English. The intro paragraph had been written the night before, so it was all downhill from there. She knocked the whole paper out in less than an hour.

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She left for class just after noon, even though it had been moved to a building closer to her house. The regular lecture class had been replaced with an artist lecture in the Art Foundation building, which was, in essence, down the street. Realizing her timing error, she slowed down and walked all the way around the building to waste as much time as possible. Finally coming around to the front, the automatic doors opened, and she stopped dead, staring at the floor.

There, as if waiting for her, was a large duct tape arrow pointing to the stairs.

To anyone else, the arrow simply pointed out the alternative method of ascending the building. But to her and several of her friends it was a memento of one spectacular day last November. Yasha had come down for a visit, wanting to try out something that a friend of his had tried at her college: duct taping a person to a wall. The other group had been unsuccessful, but Eleanor weighed barely 100 pounds, and with Yasha’s ‘skills’ they were sure to succeed!

And so, four hours and three and a half rolls of duct tape later, she was suspended a foot above the ground in a sticky silver blanket. She then proceeded to peel herself off the wall, hanging precariously for a moment by one arm before dropping the last few inches. She walked almost a mile back to the dorm still wearing the tape, random bits of trash stuck to the sticky side by her friends.

Back to the present. Taking a few steps forward and around the other people gathered in front of the elevators she marveled at the arrow’s continued existence. I wonder if anyone will ever bother to pull the tape up? Wouldn’t it be awesome if it stayed there till I graduated? The elevator doors opened and she stepped inside.

The lecturing artist was a young Chinese-American woman, Helen Lee. She described herself as a glassblower and graphic designer, using blown glass vessels to make letters. She was interested in language and the body and how they intersect and interact. It was one of the more unique and engaging artist lectures Eleanor had been to, and was definitely glad the usual class had been replaced with this.

While walking to the Fine Arts Building and her next class she sent a picture of the tape arrow to Yasha and to Facebook as proof of its continued existence. She stopped in front of the giant yarn contraption spreading along the railing. There was still almost half an hour until class, so she pulled out her hook and set to work adding more to her octopus of the day before.

Time for class. Pulling out her keys she attempted to unlock her locker and get her tool box out. But the key wouldn’t turn. I just opened it last night! What happened? Ten minutes of trying and still nothing. She was frustrated. Another girl in the class noticed and tried her hand at it, before calling over the only male in the class for a try. Finally the tumbler turned and the lock popped open. Grumbling she pulled her box out and started unloading tools, setting to work.

She finished the tension lip and sanded the main container with successively finer grits of paper. But all the soldering stations were filled, so she spent a while wasting time. Finally, an opening. She soldered the bits of the lip together. She soldered pieces of wire to the bottom of the container which would become the rivets for the plastic pearl feet. Class ended, they all cleaned up. She kept working.

She had finished the rivets and was adjusting the angles of the feet when one of them broke off. It had been soldered with easy solder, the lowest heat one. There was nothing she knew of that could be done, and with the deadline just two days away (though one of them didn’t count) there was no time to start over. She was going to wait for Sheal to get back from her class and ask for help, but she was getting restless. She finished the rest of the box. The lid was assembled, the clay sand dollar was attached, the body was polished. She decided to just leave it and make up something about the foot coming off ‘in transit,’ rather than hot gluing it on and risking her grade.

As it was the other three feet didn’t quite match up. The box, even if it had all four, didn’t sit quite upright, listing to one side. When she held it up in the correct orientation two of the feet appeared to be almost centered along the bottom while the lone foot was sticking out the side. It was too late to fix it. The rest of the box was finished and clean; it would just have to sit crooked. She was not looking forward to the critique on Thursday.

It was 8 before she walked back home. She had gone to a sandwich shop earlier for dinner, ordering a salad because her hands were brown with copper dust and no doubt covered in other unpleasant substances. Such things had never really bothered her in high school. She would frequently forego the rubber tongs in the photo darkroom, preferring her own fingers, and consequently she imbibed small amounts of toxic chemicals over those four years. But this was a new kind of horribleness, one that she could actually see. So she ate her salad with a fork.

Arriving home a voice greeted her from the bowels of the house. It was Nicole. Setting her bag down – but not before fishing out her copper container – and grabbing a pint of ice cream from the freezer she ventured upstairs to Liz’s room to be social for once. Ces had gone to JMU for an event with a friend and would be back later that night. Eleanor sat on Liz’s nice carpet – hers was the only carpeted room in the house – eating her ice cream and lamenting the shortcomings of her project.

Soon the already ridiculous conversation going on around her divulged into reminiscing about Destiny’s Child and the Spice Girls and all those other good girl bands of the 90s. Eleanor sat there with her laptop – having traded her ice cream tub for the device after a while – listening and laughing at the antics of the other two. Her own childhood had been filled with different music, having never really had the opportunity to pick the radio station: talk radio or classic rock or the rotating mix. She wasn’t a very musically-minded child, though she had certainly grown to be a musically-independent young adult. She wasn’t really sure when the shift had occurred but the change had been for the better, she reasoned. It had gotten to the point where she could not stand silence. Silence was something to be beaten viciously with a blunt object. She thrived on sounds and music, even if she wasn’t really listening to it; it was more for the noise, the not-silence.

Around 10 she left them to their own devices and set up in the newly-furnished living room. She played her own music and wondered when exactly Ces would get in.

She anticipated the coming day, for it promised to be an amazing one – even though it started with a test.

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